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| Re: The Sermon I Heard on Friday, Too Bad Nilet Wasn't There (1229499) | |||
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Re: The Sermon I Heard on Friday, Too Bad Nilet Wasn't There |
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Posted by Nilet on Sun Sep 28 12:31:32 2014, in response to The Sermon I Heard on Friday, Too Bad Nilet Wasn't There, posted by WMATAGMOAGH on Sun Sep 28 10:56:49 2014. At least as far as I know, Nilet wasn't there.I'm not a fan of sermons. My rabbi gave a very good sermon (I think some of these get posted online too, I could reshare the entire text here if it is) explaining why we should believe God exists even if there is no scientific proof. See, that tells me a lot more than you think— science doesn't deal in "proof," so that would tend to indicate said rabbi has less than the standard number of clues with regard to how science, evidence, and reason work. Furthermore, there never will be, but there are plenty of things in this world that seem possible only if a divine being is behind them. This is fairly standard-issue religious hogwash. Religion itself spawns out of our tendency to see human activity where it doesn't exist— our brains are evolved largely towards the goal of having close-knit societies to compensate for our lack of individual strength, which requires sophisticated abilities to read other people's emotions, determine their desires, and predict their actions. We've become so good at recognising and understanding human action and intent that we can gain insight into long-dead societies by the artifacts they leave behind, but this ability comes at the cost of false positives— we're so quick to read and determine intent that we become trigger-happy and see it where it doesn't exist. Some people are better at avoiding or catching those false positives than others. The ones who can't become religious— unable to understand that the universe was not created by human activity, they start asking "who" made it. Science can't give them an answer because it's not a valid question, so religion steps up to the plate. Your rabbi believes that some things "seem possible only if a divine being is behind them" because he is literally unable to comprehend the idea that something might happen without a human causing it to happen. If it was impossible for a real human to cause something, he automatically ascribes its cause to an imaginary human— a "divine being." Whether you can find the sermon online or not, can you at least offer up the specific reasoning? I'd like to be able to mock you specifically for believing in specific hogwash, not generally for believing in general hogwash. I'd also like to know how the rabbi made the leap from "a god exists" to "a god wants you to abstain from bacon and Saturday brunch." Surely if there's no evidence the guy even exists, it would be absolutely impossible to have any specific knowledge as to his desires and phobias. |
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